Clayton Christensen: Still disruptive

And still fantastic. Great article in The Economist. This man knows the difference between MOOCs and other types of online education – the advantages and disadvantages of each, the benefits, uses, and vast difference.

“if all that Harvard did was provide MOOCs to everyone so they could employ the technology in existing business models, it wouldn’t change much. But where it would make huge difference is on the delivery of education amongst a population that can’t come to Harvard Business School. And those are people who are working, or who have kids, and they can’t drop it all to get a traditional education. So firms have started corporate universities, and rather than saying you need to take this course for a semester and you have to learn what we say you need to know, corporate universities call Harvard up and say: “We need to teach strategy in a week. It needs to be customised to the, say, chicken industry. And it needs to start on this day and finish on this day.” And that’s a very different delivery of content. So MOOCs will be important when we are using that to replace learning from a teacher to learning on the job. But these will be a one to one replacement of a real teacher. But the real excitement comes in the upper level courses of undergraduate programmes and the second year of MBAs and the like. I think they will be served by networks rather than by MOOCs. On the network is, say, Clay Christensen’s little tutorial on a particular subject. And you have another tutorial on something else. So the content is developed by users and teachers. So if I need to develop strategy for a week in the chicken industry, I just take this and that and slice them together and that is going to be the dominant model. The MOOCs will just be entry level courses.”